November 16, 2006
Shiplike ‘city,’ scenes of war, pirate radio featured in new Henry exhibits
It’s loosely patterned after a map of two islands along the Seine in Paris, but Floating Plaster/City Motion, the latest multimedia presentation of the Henry Art Gallery’s New Works Laboratory, remains happily open to interpretation, its creators agree.
The piece is one of three that opened on Nov. 9 at the Henry. Also opening were (We Decided to Let Them Say “We Are Convinced” Twice. It Was More Convincing This Way),” by artist Walid Raad, and Beyond Territory, by the art group neuroTransmitter.
“It looks almost like a ship — overall it looks almost like a spaceship in the air,” said sculptor Yuki Nakamura of Floating Plaster/City Motion, which resulted from her being teamed with multimedia artist Robert Campbell to create the installation. “Or a miniature city, and you feel like you are big.”
Indeed, Floating Plaster/City Motion looks like all of these and more at different moments of its approximately nine-minute looped presentation. In the middle of the darkened Media Gallery, the piece — two sets of shapes — appears to awaken, with points of light and slow, laserlike lines crawling across its varied surfaces. Seconds later, these give way to dizzyingly fleeting, bright images of city details that speak, perhaps, of shock and violence.
The New Works Laboratory pairs artists of different backgrounds, to see what creativity sparks between them. Nakamura, a UW BFA graduate, is a sculptor mostly in ceramics and Campbell is a filmmaker and video artist. The two, who have been working together since May, say they work well together and may even consider another collaboration.
The installation is not only a joint effort between the two artists but also between two arts organizations — the Henry and 911 Media Arts Gallery. It played at the 911 Center in September before coming to the Henry this month. At the 911 Center the piece played silently, but for the Henry, Nakamura and Campbell have added a sound collage that vividly complements the piece’s elaborate lighting changes.
As Nakamura said, “The entire sculpture becomes an image, and the image becomes a sculpture.”
Floating Plaster/City Motion will run until Dec. 31 in the Henry’s Media Arts Gallery.
- ”I was 15 in 1982, and wanted to get as close as possible to the events, or as close as my newly acquired camera lens permitted me. Clearly not close enough,” writes Lebanese artist Walid Raad, creator of (We Decided to Let Them Say “We Are Convinced” Twice. It Was More Convincing This Way), in his artist’s statement. “This past year, I came upon the negatives from that time. I decided to look again.”
The photos are of scenes from the Israeli army’s invasion of Beirut in 1982, likely taken by the artist (though he says he has no actual memory of shooting the photos). They are of West Beirut, as seen from the eastern side of the city.
Those scenes are presented in 15 large photographs mounted high on the wall of a gallery space at the Henry, viewable either from the floor or the floor above. The photos bear, and may even be somewhat defined by, the scratches and discolorations from the 24 intervening years.
Sara Krajewski, who curated the exhibit, asked in notes for the piece, “Yet what if the world, in the instant the shutter clicked, really looked like this to the young photographer? The photographer, as a grown man, reconsiders this work today and, improbably, perhaps impossibly, perceives reality to be essentially photographic. The world at that rare, dreamlike moment did appear to be scratched, full of holes, flat and discolored like a yet-to-be fully developed photograph.”
(We Decided to Let Them Say ”We Are Convinced” Twice. It Was More Convincing This Way) runs at the Henry through Feb. 4, 2007.
- The concept of pirate radio is explored in Beyond Territory, a piece by the New York-based arts group neuroTransmitter. One of the group’s installation pieces, 12 Miles Out, referred to as an “antenna drawing,” roughly depicts, in antenna wire, the outline of one of the pirate radio ships that operated off the coast of Europe. Another installation, Radio City 299-MW, recalls the pirate radio stations that operated in the 1960s based from abandoned World War II-era military facilities located off shore in the English Channel. These sculptures are presented along with taped snippets of actual pirate radio broadcasts.
Exhibit notes state, “By reflecting on the means and aims of such rebellious activity, neuroTransmitter raises questions about the corporate and governmental control of radio and how radio might be reclaimed as a tool for protest and social advancement.” Elsewhere at the Henry, neuroTransmitter also exhibits two striking illustrations relating to the group’s work.” Playing in the Henry’s North Galleries 1 and 2, Beyond Territory will run through Dec. 31.
And in addition to these, Take the Cake: Celebrating Stranger Genius Award Winners 2003-2006, which opened Nov. 2, will continue until Dec. 14.
Also continuing is The Biographical Landscape: The Photography of Stephen Shore, 1968-1993, which will run through Dec. 31.
The Henry’s web site also offers regular podcasts, here called Artcasts, which this month feature the artists behind Floating Plaster/City Motion and Beyond Territory, as well as Paul Berger, UW professor of photography, discussing Stephen Shore’s photography and an interview with Elizabeth Brown, the Henry’s chief curator.
For more information about these exhibits or the ongoing work of the Henry Art Gallery, visit online at www.henryart.org.
